China's Tencent said on Tuesday it would acquire a minority stake in Epic Games, a U.S. developer of PC, console and mobile games, in a deal that could eventually help the Chinese company realize its ambitions to expand overseas.Tencent is best known as the company behind China's largest instant messenger client QQ. But the Internet giant is also China's largest online game provider by revenue, with a 33.7 percent market share, according to Analysys International, a research firm in Beijing.While Tencent's core user base is located in China, the company has ambitions to eventually expand its services abroad, said Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting. In the[...]

Founded by former Yahoo and Google employees Daniel Raffel and Steve Krulewitz, iOS app Snapguide is announcing a $5 million Series A raise this morning, from investors Atlas Venture, Index Ventures and Michael Arrington’s* CrunchFund. This financing comes after a sizeable $2 million seed (more like a “pit”) round.Snapguide’s simple UI makes it easy for users to build “How-To” guides via iPhone. Co-founder Raffel tells me that already the company has had 10K guides like “How to Make a Sock Bun” created since its launch this March, with millions of unique views spread among them.In the same space as Instructables or WikiHow, but more mobile-fo[...]

With more than a decade of digital media experience, I?ve seen plenty of bad ideas posing as innovation. For example, a few weeks ago I noticed a QR code that was incorporated into a mobile display ad. I stared quizzically at the screen on my mobile device and thought: How the heck am I going to take an image of that QR code when my camera is on the opposite side of the screen?It?s baffling to me how someone could think that was a good idea. Not all such efforts are as obviously laughable. For years now, marketers have spent countless dollars and man-hours urging consumers to download mobile apps using solely mobile display ads. Think about it: How often have you seen an ad encouraging you[...]

Eucalyptus, the cloud platform company that wants to bridge corporate private clouds to the Amazon cloud�, is updating its platform software to bring it more in line with the open source model.CEO Marten Mickos said the latest release of the Eucalyptus cloud platform cements�its status as a champion of open source development�but does not do much to further the promise of Amazon API compatibility. That will come in the 3.2 release due at the end of the year, he said.?The 3.1 release marks our full commitment to open source. We did away with different editions ? now it?s just the Eucalyptus cloud platform all free and open source, all hosted on Github. Not just the code contributions but th[...]

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has requested political asylum from the government of Ecuador, and is under the protection of the country's embassy in London, the whistle-blowing website said in a Twitter message on Tuesday.Ecuador's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement it is evaluating Assange's request and a decision will take into account "respect for the rules and principles of the International Law and the traditional policy of Ecuador to safeguard human rights."WikiLeaks has published leaked diplomatic cables and other information that embarrassed several governments and international businesses.The move by Assange comes about a week after the U.K. Supreme Court refused[...]